By Purva Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO of Lily AI
Key Takeaways
- Algorithm changes and feature updates have impacted organic traffic & SEO for over a decade.
- AI Overviews and zero-click search have increased impressions, but not clicks.
- Brands and retailers must adapt to thrive in the AI-powered SEO and GEO era.
Brands are finally seeing the direct impact of AI on traditional Google-focused SEO, with 30% decreases in organic web traffic. Why? AI Overviews (AIOs) in Google answer questions without the need to click further, known as zero-click search. Yet AIOs aren’t the first nail, and may not be the last nail either, in that SEO coffin.
News websites and publishers in particular have been navigating the organic traffic battlefield for over a decade.
The relationship between big tech companies, such as Google, Meta, and now OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic, and digital publishers has been reshaped by algorithmic decisions, zero-click features, monetization models, and AI-driven disruptions. The Wall Street Journal reports over the last three years alone, organic web traffic has dropped by about 50% for major web news sites, including Business Insider, HuffPost, Washington Post, and The New York Times.
When both the internet and AI are sustained by quality data and human-generated content, this is a problem. This content problem is one that AI can’t solve on its own, facing model collapse or worse, AI Slop.
So what’s in the crystal ball for retail and e-commerce? The past is prologue, so let’s review five major milestones that have brought us to today and extrapolate from them how brands will adapt to thrive in the AI era.
5 Times Tech Disrupted SEO
2015: Mobile Usage Surpasses Desktop and Facebook Launches Instant Articles
In 2015, two foundational shifts quietly began reshaping the publisher ecosystem:
- Google confirmed mobile searches surpassed desktop for the first time. This forced publishers to confront performance and experience shortcomings across mobile, eventually influencing SEO and monetization performance.“Singhal’s announcement comes one day after the company unveiled its Accelerated Mobile Pages Product (AMP)*. As its name suggests, the project aims to help webpages load more quickly. Many view the product as a competitor to Facebook’s Instant Articles, though Google says it is not limited to news publications.” – TechCrunch, 2015
- Facebook launched Instant Articles with select partners like The New York Times and BuzzFeed, allowing articles to load directly inside Facebook’s app.
“Facebook’s long-rumored plan to directly host articles from news organizations will start on Wednesday, concluding months of delicate negotiations between the Internet giant and publishers that covet its huge audience but fear its growing power.” – The New York Times, 2015
Impact: While subtle at the time, these developments paved the way for future algorithmic shifts, reinforcing platform control and diminishing direct publisher traffic. Mobile-first optimization and platform-native content became prerequisites for visibility and monetization.
*Note on “AMP”: Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is essentially no longer a requirement or a preferential factor in Google Search. While it was initially created to speed up mobile web pages, Google has shifted its focus to “Core Web Vitals” and “page experience” as key ranking factors.
2016: Facebook Prioritizes Friends & Family Over Publishers
In June 2016, Facebook changed its News Feed algorithm to prioritize updates from friends and family, reducing the reach of content from publishers and businesses.
“Facebook is also making a feed ranking change today that literally puts its primary value that “Friends and family come first” into practice. The News Feed will now show posts from friends higher up in the feed than posts from Pages like news outlets. Pages should expect a decline in reach and referral traffic, especially if they rely on clicks directly to their posts rather than re-shares by their followers.” – TechCrunch, 2016
Impact: Publishers lost significant organic reach, leading to declines in social referral traffic. Many shifted budgets to paid social and alternative content strategies.
2018: Google Introduces Featured Snippets at Scale
Google ramped up its deployment of featured snippets (position zero), summarizing publisher content directly in search results.
“Google said on Wednesday that it’s rolling out a new format for “featured snippets” that will try to answer multiple different interpretations of a vague search query. Featured snippets are the boxed results that Google puts at the top of the page, based on an algorithmic determination of the best answer to a query.” – CNBC, 2018
Impact: Click-through rates dropped significantly for affected queries, particularly informational ones. This hurt traffic-driven revenue models, including ad impressions and affiliate link conversions.
2023–2024: Google Launches AI Overviews (Formerly SGE)
Google introduced Search Generative Experience (SGE) in 2023, evolving into AI Overviews by 2024, displaying AI-generated summaries in search results.
“Even in the pre-2010 days, most SEOs I talked to had the sense that the “10-blue-links” era was fading (especially after the integration of things like Google Maps, weather, sports scores, etc. between 2006-2009). I never believed much in predicting the future, but I don’t think the rise of zero-click searches and instant answers would have been a huge surprise to anyone who watched the SERPs in those years.” – Rand Fishkin in Search Engine Land, 2023
Impact: Zero-click search becomes more common in the AI-powered search world, continuing a trend of Google shifting into answer engine, vs search engine mode, favoring answers over blue links.
2025: Publishers Face GEO, AIO, and Zero-Click Crisis
At Cannes Lions 2025, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince highlighted the decline in publisher referral traffic resulting from AI-driven summaries. While traffic is down, bot traffic is up. The crawl-to-click ratio ten years ago was 2:1, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent a publisher. Now, for Google it’s 18:1. OpenAI is 1,500:1. And Anthropic? 60,000:1. While websites bear the necessary technical burden of additional bot traffic, they don’t benefit from additional audience traffic if readers don’t click the blue links on Google.
“Publishers face an existential threat in the AI era and need to take action to make sure they are fairly compensated for their content, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Axios at an event in Cannes on Thursday” – Axios, 2025
Impact: Publishers face an existential risk. With Anthropic’s recent copyright infringement win, precedent might be set that AI companies don’t need to license or pay for the content used to train and feed their models.
What This Means for Retail: 3 Predictions
1. Retailers Become Content Publishers, Too
Retailers initially entered the media space by becoming media sellers via retail media networks (RMNs). The next evolution may involve brands and retailers acting more like influencers and content creators themselves, investing in newsletters and communities, or even media partnerships (e.g., Best Buy x CNET) to engage larger audiences of high-intent shoppers.
2. Affiliate Marketing Evolves, Fast
Retailer reliance on affiliate marketing has taken a hit from GEO and AIO in terms of organic traffic and direct last-click attribution. Ironically, curated collections and trusted recommendations are ideal sources for citation in GEO and AIO. Short of direct agreements between publishers and LLMs (e.g., OpenAI x AP, Google x Reddit), the affiliate model needs to adapt fast, either through broader direct licensing agreements, shifting focus to channels not as impacted by AI Overviews (Discord, Social Media), or doubling-down on engaging their own audiences directly via Substack.
3. Embracing Zero-Click & Sunsetting Last-Click, Now
Legacy models of last-click attribution and hyper-focusing on organic web traffic from Google is done. That’s not a bad thing! For one, new sources are starting to drive organic traffic, most notably LLMs and answer engines like ChatGPT. With new discovery and shopping environments often come new advertising opportunities, such as AI paid search, which is expected to see Retail Media-like growth. While these are trackable and measurable traffic sources, the true value is bigger than clicks: it’s share of voice and share of model.
The bigger picture? A great decoupling where organic impression growth increases while clicks decline means there’s a new goal and KPI: visibility and impressions. Products first need to be found to be sold in the dynamic AI era of search and discovery. Enter: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).